Grilled Gulf Shrimp served on a Fried Green Tomato and Remoulade paired with Terrapin Rye Squared
The high gravity Terrapin beers have just entered Alabama. This was my first experience with the Rye Squared. As usual the hops in the Terrapin worked wonders with the spice in the remoulade to make an explosive spice mix. Wonderful.

Jolly Pumpkin La Roja served with a traditional Chef’s Salad and La Roja Vinaigrette Dressing
Jolly Pumpkin make very interesting and complex beers using wild fermentation, and are not the easiest to get hold of. All of them have some brettanomyces to provide a sour, wild flavour and unique taste profile.
The combination with the vinaigrette dressing and the chef’s salad is divine. The gentle sourness provides an almost vinegary tang that works perfectly with the salad. Seek out Jolly Pumpkin ales – don’t be put off by the description “sour” – this is an exceptionally good beer.

Three Cheese Tortellini covered in an Alabama Chevre Pasta Sauce accompanied by Rochefort 8 Trappiste Ale
The three-cheese pasta and goat cheese sauce is a great dish in itself.  The Rochefort is the 73rd best beer in the world (at the time of writing) and deserves this place – it is stunningly flavourful, rich and malty, explosively carbonated and delicious.
The combination is sheer perfection. The maltiness in the beer matches the rich unctuousness of the cheese, while the explosive carbonation scrubs the palate – and tongue – clean with every mouthful, cleaning and refreshing the palate to make every bite of the tortellini just as tasty as the first.
An example of a perfect beer and food pairing.

Cask Conditioned Ola Dubh Special 40 Reserve along with Sliced Smoked BBQ Mutton
Ola Dubh – Scottish Gaelic for Black Oil – is an old ale from Scotland. It’s matured in a cask that was previously used to mature single malt Scottish whisky from Highland Park, Scotland’s second most northerly distillery. It is rich, dense, tasty, with profound notes of single malt; a sublime beverage.
The Ola Dubh stands in stark contrast to the rich smokiness of the pulled mutton and the citrus-infused BBQ sauce, perking up your taste buds and providing a nice digestif to finish off the main course.

Good People Fatso Imperial Stout Ice Cream Float
Fatso is the new Imperial Stout from Birmingham’s own Good People brewery. Its taste has masses of coffee richness and an almost silky mouthfeel. In the ice cream float, it mutates into the richest, densest, most silky mocha coffee you can even imagine.  Absolutely wonderful.

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Beerlicious articles by Stuart Carter, stuart@beerlicious.net is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The beef stroganoff I make is from a 5 ingredient/15 minute cook book. Well, of course I can barely cook a hot dog in 15 minutes. Something like this takes me quite a bit longer. The guts of this are ground beef, mushrooms, a jar of beef gravy, sour cream, and green onions. That’s what’s in the cook book. I add garlic powder, another spice or two that strikes my fancy, and either red wine or red wine vinegar. Of course serve over egg noodles.

And how does a Scotch ale go with this dish of Russian orgin? Perfectly. The food actually makes the sweetness of the beer stand out and the flavors really pop. In all honesty, the beer was measurably better with the food than without. It seemed dull when the food was gone and I started sipping the beer on its own. That’s an unusual experience for me.

Mark this down as a winner.

Three Floyds are one of the best known brewpubs, famed in the beer world for their Dark Lord Imperial Stout. Robert the Bruce is their Scottish style ale, broadly similar to a brown ale in flavour profile – it’s rich and malty, with very delicate hopping to balance the sweetness.

The malty beer is a perfect pairing for the pot roast. It really does not get any better than this. Malty sweetness, rich flavours from the caramelised meat juices, the meat meltingly tender on the tongue, and the almost unctuous natural gravy – hoo boy, good stuff!

The surprise for me was the pairing with Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate. For me it just works, for others it may not – this is the delight of pairing beer and food, you never know quite what will please your palate!